In an exciting combination of scholarship and storytelling, award-winning anthropologist Richard Price takes us on a search for the legendary Medard Aribot of Martinique—artist, convict, madman—whose life spans much of the island's twentieth century. Medard was banished to Devil's Island after his "impertinent" carving of a French colonel was hoisted over-head by rioters in a 1935 election-day protest that ended in a massacre. Price draws on long-term ethnography, archives, newspapers, old love letters, street theater, and Caribbean fiction and poetry to explore how Medard's art and live, once subversive sysmbols of anticolonial sentiment, have been silenced in the contemporary rush to modernity.
"By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price's research is more fascinating than a piece of fiction."
—Maryse Condé, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; Crossing the Mangrove; and Ségu
"A superb callaloo of a book whose ingredients of autobiography, historical narrative and the anthropologist's pursuit of the origin of folk memories reconstruct the life of a Martinique fishing village. Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the post-colonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity."
—George Lamming, author of Season of Adventure, In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person, and The Pleasures of Exile
"Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres, and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes."
—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
"An engrossing and compelling book. . . . Richard Price continues to build a body of work that in seriousness and self-revelation goes beyond even the work of Clifford Geertz. . . . He enters the discussion of modern culture with Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques but he is able to carry it further than the master, because he has kept his intellectualizing anchored in the experience of cultural and social difference."
—Roger D. Abrahams, author of Singing the Master and Afro-American Folktales
"A wonderfully readable fusion of anthropology and memoir about culture, colonialism, and madness in the Caribbean. Price practices what a lot of postmodernists preach; the book's graceful writing and innovative form, tossing the reader back and forth in time and space, is supported by solid and original scholarship."
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America and The Lure of the Local